The Uses of History

News from the Empire by Fernando Del Paso

                        “I’ll tell you,” she said, in the same hurried and passionate whisper,

                        “what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation,

                        utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole  

                        world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!

                                                                                               Charles Dickens

True history, insists historian J.H. Plumb in his 1969 book The Death of the Past, is basically destructive in the way that, by its very nature, it attacks those mythical, religious, and political interpretations of the past by which cultures and nations sanctify themselves, cleansing “the story of mankind from those deceiving visions of a purposeful past.” It is a passage that might very well be used to describe certain types of literary fiction as well, novels—like War and Peace and The Man Without Qualities, like Del Paso’s truly magisterial News from the Empire—that not only cleanse the story of mankind from those deceiving visions of a purposeful, mythical past, but enrich and complicate it by adding flesh and feeling to its bones. History—as novelists know well—is finally an eminently personal thing.  

“In 1861,” writes Del Paso in his prefatory remarks to the novel, “Benito Juárez suspended payment on the foreign debt of Mexico. This suspension was the pretext that the Emperor of the French, Napoleon III, used to send an army of occupation to Mexico with the purpose of creating a monarchy there, at the helm of which would be a European Catholic monarch. An Austrian, Ferdinand Maximilian of Hapsburg, was chosen. He arrived in Mexico in the middle of 18164 accompanied by his wife, Princess Charlotte of Belgium.  The book is based on these historical facts, and on the story of the tragic end of this ephemeral Emperor and Empress of Mexico.”  

  

Indeed Maximillian, for all his good, liberal intentions, proved particularly ill-suited to the post, to the demands of successfully contending with both the international intrigues that had brought him to power there and with the increasingly violent divisions within Mexico itself. Preferring to ‘chase butterflies’ on his estate at the ancient Borda Gardens in Cuernavaca, gardens perhaps most recently made famous as the site of the final scene of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano in which the body of the novel’s hero, the British consul Geoffrey Firmin, is dumped like so much rubbish into the barranca below:

¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN?

¿QUE ES SUYO?

¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

Maximillian’s death, by firing squad, was scarcely more distinguished than that. 

What is particularly remarkable about this novel, aside from its often extraordinarily fine prose, is that, for all its historical sweep and grandeur, it is rendered up for the reader on a decidedly intimate, decidedly human scale, filtered as it is, in large part, through the mad and fevered reveries of the aged, long-widowed Carlota, an embittered, broken-hearted, remarkably Miss Havisham-like woman who, passes the time, following her inglorious return to Europe, in “mercurial madness,” pining daily for her late husband and true love, Maximilian, and berating the world for its indifference to such refined, once-noble fates.  

The novel opens with her haughty, still imperious voice:

I am Marie Charlotte of Belgium, Empress of Mexico and America. I am Marie Charlotte Amelie, cousin of the Queen of England, Grand magister of the Cross of Saint Charles, and Vicereine of the Lombardo-Veneto Provinces, which Austria’s clemency and mercy has submitted under the two-headed eagle of the House of Habsburg I am Marie Charlotte Amélie Victoria, daughter of Leopold. Prince of Saxe-Coburg and King of Belgium, known as ‘The Nestor of Europe,’ and who would take me onto his lap, caress my chestnut tresses, and call me the little sylph of the Castle of Laeken. I am Marie Charlotte Amélie Victoria Clémentine, daughter of Louise Marie of Orléans, the saintly queen with the blue eyes and the Bourbon nose who died of consumption and of the sorrow caused by the exile and death of Louis Philippe, my grandfather, who, as King of France, showered me with chestnuts and covered my face with kisses in the Tuileries Gardens. I am Marie Charlotte Amélie Victoria Clémentine Léopoldine, niece of Prince Joinville and cousin of the Count of Paris; I am sister of the Duke of Brabant, who became King of Belgium and colonized the Congo, and of the Counts of Flanders in whose arms I learned to dance, at the age of ten, under the shade of flowering hawthorns. I am Charlotte Amélie, wife of Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Prince of Loraine, Emperor of Mexico and King of the World, who was born in the Imperial Palace of Schönbrunn, and who was the first descent of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to cross the ocean and tread on America soil; who built a white palace for me with a view of the sea on the shores of the Adriatic; who later took me to Mexico to live in a gray castle with a view of the valley and the snowcapped volcanoes and who, on a June morning, many years ago, was executed in the city of Querétero. I am Charlotte Amélie, Regent of Anahuac, Queen of Nicaragua, Baroness of Matto Grosso, and Princess of Chichén Itzá. I am Charlotte Amélie of Belgium, Empress of Mexico and America. I am eighty-six years old and for sixty years now I’ve quenched my lunatic thirst with water from Roman fountains…

  

Rounding out this singular voice and perspective are those of a wide variety of contemporary players, both distinguished and prosaic, ranging from Napoleon III, Count Metternich, Emperor Maximillian, and Benito Juárez to a patriotic camp follower, a cuckolded palace gardener, and a randy Basque priest. For those with a fondness for Mexico, News from the Empire is a demanding, if exceptionally rewarding tale.

Peter Adam Nash